MUNICH: Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT, said on Thursday said the European Union should be actively regulating artificial intelligence (AI).

Speaking at an event at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) he said that he is generally of the opinion that it is better to wait and see what happens and then react responsibly, but there are situations "where we should be proactive" and AI regulation is one of them.

"We don't know exactly how it's going to come up. It's still pretty vague. I think AI should be regulated. I think there is a version of the European AI Act that can be good, but we'll see how it all ends up," he said.

When speaking to journalists in London, Altman said the current thinking for the law was causing him "a lot of concern" and he did not rule out withdrawing from the EU.

OpenAI would indeed try to comply with the regulations, he said. "But if we can't comply with them, we will cease operations," the Financial Times quoted him as saying.

Altman does not believe in the possibility of completely unbiased AI. The question of whose values the systems should be guided by must be clarified, he said.

The entrepreneur does not have a clear answer yet, but he plans to discuss the challenges with developers and others affected by the technology worldwide.

Before the event at TUM, the OpenAI boss met with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin. With Scholz, he spoke about how to find the right balance between the benefits that can come from regulating AI technology - in the short and long term - while not overly restricting innovation, he said.

The best-known tool by the US developer OpenAI is the chatbot ChatGPT, which has been available for free since November and has been the subject of much discussion ever since. With the help of AI, ChatGPT can answer questions from a wide range of topics or even write entire essays.

 - dpa